One of the beauties of weblogs is that sooner or later someone writes what you were going to write someday--and probably does it better anyway.

Occasionally the question comes up--why a weblog and not a mailing list or a news group or a discussion board. Some of the reasons from Cutting Through:

'Seeding' forums is very difficult

Getting a forum to a point where it is self-sustaining is very difficult in practice--it needs a large and active population to keep the dialogues flowing, but the population is drawn in the first place by flowing dialogues. This 'chicken and egg' situation is a difficult one to overcome--the overwhelming majority of visitors to a site will be passive 'consumers' of content rather than contributors, meaning that sites have to attract a very large number of visitors to get a contributor community of sufficient size to maintain forums.

Blogs tend not to suffer from this problem - it only takes one person to post articles, and comments will appear active and vibrant with a very much smaller number of active participants than an equivalent forum.

Decaying forums are very off-putting for visitors

It's very obvious when a forum is inactive, because the numbers and dates of posts are prominently displayed. This is the online equivalent of tumbleweed--although there may be a huge number of visitors to the site, the perception created by the inactive forums is that there are very few.

A blog, by contrast, can look active with a much lower level of activity - meaning that it can take much less effort to ‘feed and water’.

There's an increasing trend towards syndication

Syndication is becoming an increasingly popular way of subscribing to sites-- the benefits include being able to monitor a very large number of sites from a single application, and rapid reading of new articles as they arrive.

Not all forum systems provide syndication feeds, and those that do suffer from the transition from a threaded dialogue on the forum to the linear one-after-the-other format of a news aggregator. The effect is to disconnect each post from its conversational context, making it very difficult to follow. Blogs, on the other hand, can feed comments with context intact by including the original post and prior comments.